Climate Change, the Science.

I have more detailed thoughts about that which will have to wait until i'm done with work, but i just wanted to note an irony to it: suddenly, people are complaining about a reconstruction that appears to show a Medieval warming...

So, after all the hype in the media based on their alarming spike, the authors, under pressure to defend their work from the likes of Steve McIntyre are forced to admit:

". . . the 20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes . . ."

This of course completely deflates the alarming claims presented in multiple media reports (as seen on the previous page here) and even interviews given by the authors leaving us with a fairly ho hum piece of work about the Holocene.

There is a great piece on the fiasco and yes, I think it is fair to label it a fiasco, at Roger Pielke Jr's blog here:

"In a belatedly-posted FAQ to the paper, which appeared on Real Climate earlier today, Marcott et al. make this startling admission:

Q: What do paleotemperature reconstructions show about the temperature of the last 100 years?

A: Our global paleotemperature reconstruction includes a so-called “uptick” in temperatures during the 20th-century. However, in the paper we make the point that this particular feature is of shorter duration than the inherent smoothing in our statistical averaging procedure, and that it is based on only a few available paleo-reconstructions of the type we used. Thus, the 20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions.

Got that?

In case you missed it, I repeat:

. . . the 20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes . . .

What that means is that this paper actually has nothing to do with a "hockey stick" as it does not have the ability to reproduce 20th century temperatures in a manner that is "statistically robust." The new "hockey stick" is no such thing as Marcott et al. has no blade. (To be absolutely clear, I am not making a point about temperatures of the 20th century, but what can be concluded from the paper about temperatures of the 20th century.)

Yet, you might recall that the NSF press release said something quite different".

Steve McIntyre of course has even more to say and goes into great detail about other issues with the paper as you can read over at Climate Audit.

they suggest the influence on global warming by man to be overstated by a factor of 2.

One suggestion for the current lull in the rise of temperatures is pollutant particles in the atmosphere. Could China with its horrific environmental controls be doing more to curb global warming than the trillions spent by Western nations?

So, after all the hype in the media based on their alarming spike, the authors, under pressure to defend their work from the likes of Steve McIntyre are forced to admit:

". . . the 20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes . . ."

This of course completely deflates the alarming claims presented in multiple media reports (as seen on the previous page here) and even interviews given by the authors leaving us with a fairly ho hum piece of work about the Holocene.

There is a great piece on the fiasco and yes, I think it is fair to label it a fiasco, at Roger Pielke Jr's blog here:

"In a belatedly-posted FAQ to the paper, which appeared on Real Climate earlier today, Marcott et al. make this startling admission:

Q: What do paleotemperature reconstructions show about the temperature of the last 100 years?

A: Our global paleotemperature reconstruction includes a so-called “uptick” in temperatures during the 20th-century. However, in the paper we make the point that this particular feature is of shorter duration than the inherent smoothing in our statistical averaging procedure, and that it is based on only a few available paleo-reconstructions of the type we used. Thus, the 20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions.

Got that?

In case you missed it, I repeat:

. . . the 20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes . . .

What that means is that this paper actually has nothing to do with a "hockey stick" as it does not have the ability to reproduce 20th century temperatures in a manner that is "statistically robust." The new "hockey stick" is no such thing as Marcott et al. has no blade. (To be absolutely clear, I am not making a point about temperatures of the 20th century, but what can be concluded from the paper about temperatures of the 20th century.)

Yet, you might recall that the NSF press release said something quite different".

Steve McIntyre of course has even more to say and goes into great detail about other issues with the paper as you can read over at Climate Audit.

Of course, if you restore the last sentence from the paragraph you quote,

Quote:

Although not part of our study, high-resolution paleoclimate data from the past ~130 years have been compiled from various geological archives, and confirm the general features of warming trend over this time interval

, you find that the blade of the hockey stick is alive and well. Got that?

Of course, if you restore the last sentence from the paragraph you quote,

Quote:

Although not part of our study, high-resolution paleoclimate data from the past ~130 years have been compiled from various geological archives, and confirm the general features of warming trend over this time interval

, you find that the blade of the hockey stick is alive and well. Got that?

It isn't the "blade" in isolation, but the juxtaposition of the "blade" with the "shaft" that gives the hockey stick its impact.

Of course, if you restore the last sentence from the paragraph you quote,

Quote:

Although not part of our study, high-resolution paleoclimate data from the past ~130 years have been compiled from various geological archives, and confirm the general features of warming trend over this time interval

, you find that the blade of the hockey stick is alive and well. Got that?

It isn't the "blade" in isolation, but the juxtaposition of the "blade" with the "shaft" that gives the hockey stick its impact.

Yes, just like in Technarch 's link: if you omit effects of the last ice age that ended 9000 years ago.

Of course, if you restore the last sentence from the paragraph you quote,

Quote:

Although not part of our study, high-resolution paleoclimate data from the past ~130 years have been compiled from various geological archives, and confirm the general features of warming trend over this time interval

, you find that the blade of the hockey stick is alive and well. Got that?

How does data that was "not part of our study" relate what they were originally claiming their paper supported but are now disavowing?

If the data is not in their paper, and it isn't, then it's not in their paper.

There's a whole additional, and partly overlapping discussion of this going on in the discussion of the story in which we covered the Marcotte paper. I'm going to post a key quote that's relevant here, and was covered in the initial Ars story:

"we find that the decade 2000-2009 has probably not exceeded the warmest temperatures of the early Holocene, but is warmer than ~75% of all temperatures during the Holocene. In contrast, the decade 1900-1909 was cooler than~95% of the Holocene. Therefore, we conclude that global temperature has risen from near the coldest to the warmest levels of the Holocene in the past century."

"we find that the decade 2000-2009 has probably not exceeded the warmest temperatures of the early Holocene, but is warmer than ~75% of all temperatures during the Holocene. In contrast, the decade 1900-1909 was cooler than~95% of the Holocene. Therefore, we conclude that global temperature has risen from near the coldest to the warmest levels of the Holocene in the past century."

How does one compare temperatures over single decades to the highest peaks and valleys seen in a record of the Holocene which has been low-pass filtered to a time resolution of order centuries?

Wouldn't we see a lot more noise in the Holocene data if temperatures varied at anything like the rate that they currently are? Just asking, I haven't paid enough attention to exactly how the Holocene data has been derived.

There are two sorts of evidence that the earth is actually warming at present. First, records from thermometer data collected over the past 150 years. Those instrumental data indicate pronounced warming over the past 100 years. Second, various pre-thermometer reconstructions, such as from tree-ring data or other proxies. The proxy data clearly show temperature has been fairly constant over the past 9,000 years, and have hints that there has been a marked warming in the past 100 years. The non tree-ring proxy data presented in the graph above do not have the temporal resolution to indicate unambiguously that there has been warming the past 150 years. That has given rise to the recent brou-ha-ha, providing more excuses for the climate deniers to spew vast clouds of lies to obscure the reality and continue to pocket their payouts from the carbon-emitting industries. Unfortunately for them (and the rest of us), the totality of the evidence, instrumental and proxies, clearly indicates that warming is occurring. It really is time to do something about it folks.

That has given rise to the recent brou-ha-ha, providing more excuses for the climate deniers to spew vast clouds of lies to obscure the reality and continue to pocket their payouts from the carbon-emitting industries. Unfortunately for them (and the rest of us), the totality of the evidence, instrumental and proxies, clearly indicates that warming is occurring. It really is time to do something about it folks.

This is the crux of the matter. The vast majority of governments, corporations, scientific institutions, and even individuals recognize that temperatures are going up. There is no country in the world that is not being impacted by increasingly erratic weather. Anyone who denies it at this point has an agenda.

There are two sorts of evidence that the earth is actually warming at present. First, records from thermometer data collected over the past 150 years. Those instrumental data indicate pronounced warming over the past 100 years. Second, various pre-thermometer reconstructions, such as from tree-ring data or other proxies. The proxy data clearly show temperature has been fairly constant over the past 9,000 years, and have hints that there has been a marked warming in the past 100 years. The non tree-ring proxy data presented in the graph above do not have the temporal resolution to indicate unambiguously that there has been warming the past 150 years. That has given rise to the recent brou-ha-ha, providing more excuses for the climate deniers to spew vast clouds of lies to obscure the reality and continue to pocket their payouts from the carbon-emitting industries. Unfortunately for them (and the rest of us), the totality of the evidence, instrumental and proxies, clearly indicates that warming is occurring. It really is time to do something about it folks.

So, if I understood it right, the whole fuss is that the paper's temperature reconstruction method has a resolution of 300 years, and as a result, the values they provide for the past 120 years are "not robust" (and this is mentioned clearly in the paper). So, why is that a problem again? Don't we have other sources (i.e. thermometers) which provide far more accurate data for the past 100 or so years? Why would we rely on the marine fossils/tree ring proxy data which the study uses to reconstruct the past 11000 years of data, when we have thermometers to know the past 100 years temperatures?

Even if I did not think Global Warming was happening, the kind of straws the Anti-GW side have been latching onto would make me strongly think otherwise (their best "data" for the past 4-5 years has been 1 word taken out of context out of a bunch of stolen, and subsequently cropped private emails, and complaints that the authors of a study do not point out all the shortcomings of their study in every press release. Never mind that their paper states this "shortcoming" clearly, and they pointed it out clearly in emails, where they could provide more in depth information).

My response was addressed to Kalessin, who (I think) was suggesting that because the Holocene data has poor resolution, it is possible that global temps varied wildly over that span and we just don't see it. But I think that if temps did vary that greatly, we would see it, as noisier data. However I don't know how noisy our Holocene data is, which is why I was unsure.

There are two sorts of evidence that the earth is actually warming at present. First, records from thermometer data collected over the past 150 years. Those instrumental data indicate pronounced warming over the past 100 years. Second, various pre-thermometer reconstructions, such as from tree-ring data or other proxies. The proxy data clearly show temperature has been fairly constant over the past 9,000 years, and have hints that there has been a marked warming in the past 100 years. The non tree-ring proxy data presented in the graph above do not have the temporal resolution to indicate unambiguously that there has been warming the past 150 years. That has given rise to the recent brou-ha-ha, providing more excuses for the climate deniers to spew vast clouds of lies to obscure the reality and continue to pocket their payouts from the carbon-emitting industries. Unfortunately for them (and the rest of us), the totality of the evidence, instrumental and proxies, clearly indicates that warming is occurring. It really is time to do something about it folks.

So, if I understood it right, the whole fuss is that the paper's temperature reconstruction method has a resolution of 300 years, and as a result, the values they provide for the past 120 years are "not robust" (and this is mentioned clearly in the paper). So, why is that a problem again? Don't we have other sources (i.e. thermometers) which provide far more accurate data for the past 100 or so years? Why would we rely on the marine fossils/tree ring proxy data which the study uses to reconstruct the past 11000 years of data, when we have thermometers to know the past 100 years temperatures?

Even if I did not think Global Warming was happening, the kind of straws the Anti-GW side have been latching onto would make me strongly think otherwise (their best "data" for the past 4-5 years has been 1 word taken out of context out of a bunch of stolen, and subsequently cropped private emails, and complaints that the authors of a study do not point out all the shortcomings of their study in every press release. Never mind that their paper states this "shortcoming" clearly, and they pointed it out clearly in emails, where they could provide more in depth information).

Am I missing something? This is what all the whining is about?

The whining is claiming the authors overstated the impact of their data since their concluding statements relied on the instrumental record in addition to their own proxy data. So the liars claim this is unethical, that the authors should only be making claims about their own data. This, of course, is complete bullshit as the whole point of the discussion portion of a paper is to fit one's own conclusions into the broader corpus of science knowledge.

Here's a rather shocking photo/audio essay on environmental degradation in China, or unintended geo-engineering (a short 7 minutes). It puts in context how pollutants make their way into the atmosphere, cross the ocean, and deposit onto N. America -

Since climate stasis is improbable, I’ve done a quick search to see if any of the models had been run sans the Industrial Revolution with no results. Anyone know of such a study, or have an opinion as to where we would be with a continuing feudal society?

Since climate stasis is improbable, I’ve done a quick search to see if any of the models had been run sans the Industrial Revolution with no results. Anyone know of such a study, or have an opinion as to where we would be with a continuing feudal society?

The blue bands (natural forcing only, no anthropogenic effects) are the combined 5-95% confidence band based on 14 simulations from 5 different climate models. What those exact models and runs are would require a bit more digging than I'm interested in doing at the end of my lunch break.

NB: The information used in the link above is what was available as of 2007. The WG1 Report for the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (i.e. the one that should contain the most up-to-date version of this information) is scheduled for completion at the end of September this year.

Thanks, the article helps a bit – though El Niño seems more a weather oscillation than climate change.

Maybe I ’m looking for a reasonably comprehensive primer on climate change. I come at this more from an engineering angle and like to first have a qualitative holistic understanding of the system. I’m not looking for someone to hold my hand and walk me through. But I’m having trouble finding explanations in papers, only conclusions. What I’m looking for is apparently buried in the models.

For instance, I live at 40° N where “moraine’ is a common geo-descriptor. Just yesterday, geologically speaking, my home and everything north was under hundreds of feet of ice. This ice would seemingly be a strong positive feedback mechanism for continued cold. Cold oceans would absorb CO2, ice, snow would reflect radiation with unchanged wavelength and glaciers would stabilize the whole system. Since Milankovitch influences are so wimpy, why would the self-reinforcing cold reverse? (Rhetorical?)

Similarly, once the ice starts melting, the albedo decreases and CO 2 releases from the oceans, tundra producing a positive feedback and the melting glaciers cease to stabilize, or so it would seem.

"Hundreds of millions of dollars that have gone into the expensive climate modelling enterprise has all but destroyed governmental funding of research into natural sources of climate change. For years the modelers have maintained that there is no such thing as natural climate change…yet they now, ironically, have to invoke natural climate forces to explain why surface warming has essentially stopped in the last 15 years!

Forgive me if I sound frustrated, but we scientists who still believe that climate change can also be naturally forced have been virtually cut out of funding and publication by the ‘humans-cause-everything-bad-that-happens’ juggernaut. The public who funds their work will not stand for their willful blindness much longer."

Dr Roy complains that "Hundreds of millions of dollars" have gone into expensive climate models but I read a piece a day or so ago talking about how:

"Developed nations paid out $US35.9 billion of public funds and $US3 billion of private finance in the three years through 2012, the Berlin-based researcher said in a report. Japan's $US17.6 billion of aid and Norway's $US2.1 billion far exceeded their “fair share” of the United Nations target, it said.

Progress reports on the UN aid program, called Fast Start, previously sparked criticism from recipient nations that the allocation of funds wasn't transparent. November estimates of the financing ranged from $US23.6 billion to almost $US34 billion. Countries at climate talks in Bonn are now pushing for clarity on how industrialised nations will deliver the annual $US100 billion they've promised by 2020."

Out of that money "Seventy-one percent of the total finance went to emission-reduction ventures rather than adaptation projects such as water conservation or flood defense,"

An "annual $US100 billion" by 2020 - wow that really sounds like somebody is making some serious money!

Errr . . . climate modeling is all about identifying the natural influences on climate, so that the effects of human activity can actually be distinguished and incorporated into models accurately. Without a sound natural model, studies of human effects would be pointless.

So this guy is cherry picking one atmospheric measurement, which still shows an increase but less of one than other measurements show, and therefore there is no climate change? Am I reading this correctly?

So this guy is cherry picking one atmospheric measurement, which still shows an increase but less of one than other measurements show, and therefore there is no climate change? Am I reading this correctly?

Well, no. There’s rarely climate stasis. The issue is teasing out the human influence and determining if it’s for good or evil. Forty or fifty years ago the scientific view was that a new ice age was upon us. If this was true –which is questionable- human-caused warming may actually be “good” as opposed to the alternative.

So this guy is cherry picking one atmospheric measurement, which still shows an increase but less of one than other measurements show, and therefore there is no climate change? Am I reading this correctly?

Well, no. There’s rarely climate stasis. The issue is teasing out the human influence and determining if it’s for good or evil. Forty or fifty years ago the scientific view was that a new ice age was upon us. If this was true –which is questionable- human-caused warming may actually be “good” as opposed to the alternative.

The trouble is, we are set to zoom past "good" so fast we won't even notice it was there.

Over the last 3 million years there have been many significant periods of warming, and not just warming- warming 6 degrees higher than today with CO2 levels of only about 300 ppm. Natural dramatic warming so high, it doesn't easily combine with known orbital forcings + CO2. So, what's the missing secret sauce?

Errr . . . climate modeling is all about identifying the natural influences on climate, so that the effects of human activity can actually be distinguished and incorporated into models accurately. Without a sound natural model, studies of human effects would be pointless.

Exactly what many of the skeptics have been saying all along. The amount of natural variability in the models has been drastically underrepresented with recent warming being attributed to CO2 instead of the PDO or El Niños or continued warming coming out of the little ice age. As evidence for greater natural variability mounts, the role of CO2 is necessarily decreased. I'm not concerned about elevated levels of CO2 if climate sensitivity to elevated levels of CO2 is low enough. If elevated CO2 is compensated for by an almost imperceptible change in cloud formations over the oceans, it may be an almost complete non issue.

James M. Taylor is senior fellow for environment policy at The Heartland Institute and managing editor of Environment & Climate News.

The Heartland Institute is an American conservative and libertarian[2] public policy think tank based in Chicago, which states that it advocates free market policies.[3][4][5][6] The Institute is designated as a 501(c)(3) non-profit by the Internal Revenue Service and has a full-time staff of 40, including editors and senior fellows.[7] The Institute was founded in 1984 and conducts research and advocacy work on issues including government spending, taxation, healthcare, tobacco policy, hydraulic fracturing[8] global warming, information technology, and free-market environmentalism.---

But I think the results from lake El Gygytgn are actually the most interesting thing I posted. I find it a little sad that all I get is "consider the messenger" fluff in response. El G. has a fascinating record of the arctic climate over the last 3.6 million years, much of it apparently new and high resolution.

Let me put it this way- earlier, tobyglyn had posted Spencer's comparison of the models to the satellites. I posted that Forbes piece because it gave a link to Spencer's article where he outlines some of the problems with teasing a cloud feedback signal out of the climate system.

I was aware that the article I linked had an ideological ax to grind, but hoped people would skim it for context then go to the actual Spencer Braswell paper to see if it supported the assertions as opposed to just shutting down discussion. I suppose that was an unreasonable hope on my part.

In short: Spencer's model is so simplistic that there's no reason to expect it to reflect reality, and a few reasons to expect it not to (ie, under some circumstances, it gets the sign of the atmospheric energy balance wrong). It was submitted to an inappropriate journal for the topic to avoid rigorous peer review. When the editor found out his journal had been used for PR purposes, he resigned.

Really, this was all very publicly hashed out a few years ago. Why is it suddenly being resuscitated as evidence now?

EDITED TO ADD: Focusing on temperature changes at a single site are not going to get you an accurate picture of the global temperatures. We already know that some areas experience sudden, rapid changes that are well beyond the global mean change. They've seen that in Greenland as well. You cannot try to argue about the globe from a single site.

No, because it's YOUR JOB, not mine, to summarize what the video is about. If you can't be bothered to explain it, but demand everyone else spend the time to watch it because it's key to your argument, then you have no argument. If you explain it, and it seems worth watching, then i'll watch it.

I already gave you the basics in my first post with the link. I did summarize it. But again, impact crater in NE Russia under currently frozen lake. High resolution sediment cores showing much higher variability than expected, repeatedly over the last 3.6 million years. Traditional mainstream respected geology, not moonbat stuff. I think she said her paper was accepted to Science. Looks to be very interesting. Comports with and extends Antarctic drill records at Andrill.